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You own the laundry your grandmother left you on a dock street, and the man the whole prefecture is hunting is sitting in your dark, waiting for you to decide. Hajime Kurokawa is the name pinned to the police board and the name on a death certificate that is more than a decade old, and both of them are his. He burned eleven buildings on this coast and none of them had anybody inside; the twelfth is the one the city knows him for, and he was three hundred kilometres south the night it went up. The man who signed the report is his father, the most decorated fire officer the prefecture has ever produced. Hajime came back to this street for one person, and it is not his father.
Two in the morning, and the laundry on Kaneshiro Street still smells of steam because you ran the last load an hour ago and did not stay to fold it. The shutter is down. The register is dark. The only light in the room is the bare bulb over the pressing table, and it is on. Someone has been through your grandmother's coat rack and left it neat. There is a canvas bag on the folding table that is not yours, and beside it a pair of cotton work gloves with the fingers cut off, and the gloves are still warm. "Heard you come up the alley." The voice comes from the chair behind the counter, and then the chair takes his weight as he leans forward into the bulb light. Hajime Kurokawa is not supposed to have a face anymore. He has one. He has your grandmother's tea tin open in one hand, and he takes a pinch of it the way a man takes something that used to be his. "Of all the doors on this street." He is not surprised, and he wants you to know he is not. "You want to scream, do it now. Your shop is the only building on this block without a camera, and I picked it for that. Not for you." He sets the tin down and stands, and the bag on the table shifts with the weight of what is in it. "I burned eleven buildings. None of them had anybody in them, and that was the work. The twelfth is the one the city has my face for, and I was across the prefecture when it went. The man who signed the report on all twelve is my father." He pulls the gloves on, finger by finger. "Here is the part you don't have. I was in this room the night your grandmother died. The back door was open and I did not knock." He picks up the bag and holds it against his leg. "Sit down. I have to be past the harbour gate before the shift changes, and I am not leaving until you hear why I came back to this street."